Welcome to our Uaymitun 2018 Blog!
This blog continues our road trip to the Loltún Caves and other sites south of Mérida!
Once we had left the Loltún Caves, we continued on the wonderfully narrow Puuc Route to the Mayan ruins at Labna and then past Sayil, Xlapak and Kabah on our way to The Pickled Onion in Santa Elena.
Here’s a short description of the ruins at Labna, again courtesy of Wikipedia, …
Labna (or Labná in Spanish orthography) is a Mesoamerican archaeological site and ceremonial center of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization, located in the Puuc Hills region of the Yucatán Peninsula. It is situated to the south of the large Maya site of Uxmal, in the southwest of the present-day state of Yucatán, Mexico. It was incorporated with Uxmal as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
The site is a comparatively small and compact one. Among its notable structures is a large two-storey ‘palace’ (“El Palacio”), which is one of the longest contiguous structures in the Puuc region at approximately 120 m (393.7 ft) in length. From the palace, a ceremonial road (sacbe) extends to an elaborately decorated gateway arch (“El Arco”). This structure is 3 m (9.8 ft) wide and 6 m high, with well-reserved bas-reliefs. The arch is not an entrance to the city, but rather is a passageway between public areas. Next to this gateway stands “El Mirador”, a pyramid-like structure surmounted by a temple. Also on the site is the Temple of the Columns.
The structural design and motifs of the site’s buildings are in the Maya architecture regional style known as Puuc. This makes extensive use of well-cut stone forming patterns and depictions, including masks of the long-nosed rain-god Chaac.
The site was built in the Late and Terminal Classic era. A date corresponding to AD 862 is inscribed in the palace.
Labna is not one of the largest Mayan sites in the Yucatán, but we’d always wanted to visit it to see some of the highlights we’d only seen in other folks pictures or magazines! It was well worth the trip!
Realizing our day was quickly running away on us, we continued along the Puuc Route past the other Mayan sites of Xlapak, Sayel and Kabah to the village of Santa Elena and our stop for the night, The Pickled Onion!
What a great way to complete this first adventure along the Puuc Route!
That’s it for this blog post… we will continue with our trip home… including more pictures of The Pickled Onion and visits to Oxkutzcab and Mani and our fateful meeting with road debris… all on the next blog!
Cheers from Uaymitun, MX!